Optical drives are commonly used to write data to the surface of a recordable medium such as a CD or DVD. Specifically, optical drives use a laser to create “pits” and “lands” on the surface of the recordable medium, and the pits and lands are detected to reproduce data.
In the optical drive, write strategy parameters determine how the laser writes to the recordable medium. For example, standard address in pre-groove (ADIP) information on the recordable medium may include recommended write strategy parameters such as the power of the laser, the tilt of the laser, and so on. Examples of write parameters on a castle waveform are shown in FIG. 5. Nevertheless, a drive developer might believe certain write strategy parameters are optimal, and program such parameters into the drive firmware as default values. Consequently, the drive's firmware values may overwrite the parameters from the recordable medium's ADIP information.
In the field, optical drive writing performance often varies due to factors such as manufacturing differences between optical drives, and between recordable media (e.g., a disc type is DVD+R, CD-RW, or BD double layer, etc., whereas a brand of disc is Princo, Ricoh, Ritek, Sony, etc.), and differences between disc speeds. For the same reason, it is also ordinarily difficult to compensate for environmental conditions in the field such as temperature. Thus, write strategy parameters that provide good writing performance characteristics for one media may perform poorly when applied to others.